RPA has been a popular buzzword and will continue to be so in the coming years as well. RPA can be instrumental to bring down operational expenses, boost accuracy and enable faster operations. But, to expect that by only giving over the human tasks to bots will help businesses is an erroneous expectation.

Robotic Process Automation can be leveraged for boosting your businesses’ digitisation strategy by systematising monotonous, mundane and the often-repeated tasks, but it cannot help you gain unremitting process improvement. RPA is certainly the answer to automation needs, but it also comes with its own fixed set of lessons, which need to be internalised.

The factors to be considered before implementing RPA

To begin with, why RPA in the first place – It’s imperative to establish clarity on why it’s important for you to implement RPA. You can begin with by identifying the correct objectives. It’s a new technology, and so, organisations are at times wary of opting RPA for critical processes. That is why, many times it’s wiser to detect the specific objectives, the essential success criteria to guarantee all the specific considerations aren’t compromised.

Comprehend if the broken processes pose real threats – RPA has not been built for mending the broken processes along with the silos within an organisation’s structure. It’s a good idea to first streamline the overall process. The process must be structured well and matured and then it makes much sense for you to implement RPA in those specific activities of your business.

It’s better to track the system closely – You need to identify the right processes first, that need automation. Remember not to lose sight of the specifics. You may handle multiple bots without extravagant mechanisms. However, as the process develops and when scale increases, robust and scalable monitoring become a must. You should be able to monitor well, to track the systems optimally.

Measure and simulate – The skill to measure the crucial process limitations is extremely critical. The solution needs to have the right ability for measuring the complete cycle time, and task the level attributes and analyse how to impact the business performance.

Exception handling – While meting out a proper RPA solution, the ability to handle omissions is limited to reporting and a nonpayment fallback option. This is when handling at exceptional levels come to the scenario. In this case, RPA needs to be supported with an exception handling process mechanism that can effortlessly define a contingency option, which can come through human intervention or the rules of the management.